


Odile's Diary

by WorldshakingFF



Category: Swan Lake & Related Fandoms, Лебединое озеро - Чайковски | Swan Lake - Tchaikovsky
Genre: Alternate Universe - Ballet, F/F, Folklore, Mythical Beings & Creatures
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-07-08
Updated: 2019-07-08
Packaged: 2020-06-24 11:49:03
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,462
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/19723060
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/WorldshakingFF/pseuds/WorldshakingFF
Summary: Odile sets the record straight on what really happened between her and Odette.





	Odile's Diary

Odile’s Diary  
  
  
I was never interested in the Prince. I want to make that clear right at the very beginning. Everyone assumed I was, but really, I just wanted him out of the way.

I would have done anything to achieve that.

The story everyone tells doesn’t even make all that much sense, when you think about it, but you know how it is...there’s a guy in the story, it must be all about him. Let me assure you, it wasn’t. It was never about him. It was always about her.

Princess Odette.

Everyone loved her. She was...the sun. Her skin was creamy and pale. The kind of pale that everyone praises and admires and ignores the fact that it only comes from never being let outside, of never being allowed to lift a finger. Of course my skin was nothing like that. When people describe it in stories, they call it “tan.” Sometimes they describe it as “nut brown” or “leather” or “weathered,” but the fact is that I had darker skin than she did. She was the sun and I was...not.

I’m sorry, that analogy was annoying me. I was never a storm, or the night or any of those things. I’m just me. I wasn’t a black swan. My feathers were brown. My skin was brown. I wasn’t white, that was obvious.  
  
But he fell in love with me. I want to make that plain too. He saw me shed my feather coat and of all of us, he started towards me, but Odette was the first to shout, to draw his attention to her. Typical of her, that. “Don’t **_look at me_**!” It was so hard to not pay attention to her, even when I was so tired of the drama, the way she emphasized the thing she wanted you to do, while commanding you to not do it. It was so like her.

But that was the way the whole story went, really. Everything is backwards when people tell it now. She was the innocent and ...oh, forget it, I don’t even want to get into how we ended up that way. Trust me – it wasn’t _my_ fault. 

Someone else who shall remain nameless had a brilliant plan to sneak into a wizard’s library, and sneak a book out. Of course she wanted to do a spell, and OF COURSE it had to be a dangerous one, done late at night in a cemetery, all about ghosts and the dead. Why would it be anything else? I know, I know, that’s not the story that they tell, why would it be? She was perfect and beautiful, of course she is the tragic heroine in the story. I mean, we were in a cemetery, late at night. And there was a lake. With swans in it. No one is ever going to blame her for the spell going wrong.

It was totally Odette’s fault that the spell went wrong.

It was totally my fault, though, that we became swans. And believe me, it was all I could do to get us to be swans, because the way Odette screwed up the spell, we might have ended up skinned alive or worse. So _you’re welcome_ , Princess.

She cried a lot. We all did. Especially that first year. People wondered about the swans on the lake, all of us crying and carrying on and honking and flapping, but then they just got used to it and the mystery of the Princess and her ladies disappearing just sort of faded away with time. I didn’t mind too much. I mean, yes, I hated being a swan, we all did. But it could have been worse, so we all just sort of settled in, paddled around the lake, ate whatever and prayed for a savior. Well, they did that last bit. I was their savior and they didn’t really appreciate me at all. The Princess and the other swans would swim together, screaming and crying. So I avoided the whole gaggle of them. Yes, I know that the proper collective noun for swans is a bank. I do not care. _They_ were a gaggle.

It wasn’t that I was ostracized, I was just annoyed and wanted some, I don’t know...thanks? An apology? A kiss?  
  
Because everything that happened happened because I could never say no to Odette. I was so in love with her. It was so ridiculous. She’d smile in that conspiratorial way and I’d just melt. I don’t know if she even noticed. She probably never did.

If I’ve made her seem like a bad person, or manipulative, forgive me. She wasn’t the kind of manipulative of the selfish and self-serving, she just wanted to do things and people around her said yes. I mentioned that she was beautiful and had bright eyes and golden hair and her smile made you feel so accepted and warm, and when she took your hands, it was like every muscle in your body relaxed. She was manipulative because I would have destroyed the world for her. I guess I kind of did.

The night he showed up, I was tired. It had been a long day and I was tired. I was sleeping in a little copse away from the others because their chattering after they took off their feathers just annoyed me so much. I just could not, not that night.

But when the commotion started I woke, and stepped out of the wood. I saw him with her. They danced under the moon as the others sang for them.  
  
I’m not going to lie to you, I hated them both just then.  
  
He had his arms around her waist – the waist I wanted to embrace. He lifted her so easily, like she weighed nothing. I watched, shaking with anger. How dare he. How dare he take _my_ Princess? But then he smiled up at him in the way I’d always wanted her to look at me...although I hadn’t realized it until that moment. And so I hated them both.

All my desire for her rose in a blinding white hot sheet of anger and I knew at that moment that he had to go.

You know the story as they tell it. How I pretended to be Odette in order to get him. It was never true. I pretended to be her to get rid of him, to lead him to his death and punish him for taking from me the one thing I loved. You know that it worked. When he confessed that he’d rather die than marry me I almost broke character and laughed in his face. Marry me? I’d rather him die than marry me, too. For once we were on the same page.

But here’s the thing the story gets totally wrong every time.

Von Rothbart and I were driven into the water. That was true.

He couldn’t swim.

I had been a swan for years.

I dove far, far below the surface and waited; I watched Von Rothbart plummet, flailing and screaming the whole way until he was dragged down by the weight of his clothes. Then I carefully, slowly surfaced, moving far enough under the water so that I’d come up by my nest. I saw the others squawking and flapping and I had a thought.  
  
I flew over to the other side of the lake, and took off my feathers. Away from the others, I started walking until I met him coming to the lake once again to see his true love. Once more in my life I pretended to be her. Did the storytellers tell you the he and she flew away as swans? They are partially correct. I danced with him in the moonlight, I kissed him, we promised eternal love. And that night, I broke his neck while he slept.

I returned the next morning to her. She wept at the loss of her prince. I told her of the fickle ways of man, but that she’d always find someone true in me. I didn’t lie – I told her I’d kill for her, that I’d die for her. She looked at me, tears filling her eyes and made me promise to not leave her.

I almost told her the truth just then. I almost told her that I could pretend to be him. I almost told her so many things. Instead, I chose to become the evil creature the stories make me out to be.  
  
I took her hands in my own, I wiped the tears from her eyes and told her I loved her.  
  
The stories get one thing right, at least, when they say that two swans flew away to live happily ever after.


End file.
